New technology meets the New Testament

The Jerusalem Nano Bible company has managed to print the smallest original version of The New Testament, legible only by microscope

JERUSALEM -- The original Bible was probably painfully inscribed by hand, a process that took years, if not centuries.

Think musty rooms and candlelight.

Scroll ahead a thousand or so years and think lab coats and lasers.

To get into where an Israeli high-tech company is engraving the world's smallest Bible entails suiting up like you're entering an Ebola zone -- except in this case, it's to keep the items, not the people, from being infected.

The manufacturing process for the aptly-named "nano Bible" is something akin to a religious mystery for anyone but a techie.

One engineer says that each little square is in fact one single product. It's a full Bible - 1,210 nano Bibles on one wafer.

To put that in perspective, Lee Meyuchas, an executive assistant at the company, showed the a printed copy of the Greek New Testament next to the nano New Testament.

To read it, you need a microscope that will magnify it 1,000 times And since it's in ancient Greek, you also need the language skills of Dr Jack Pastor of Israel's Oranim College.

"I can attest that this is a true and faithful copy of the accepted Greek version of the New Testament," Pastor says.

It's also jewelry, which apart from trying to win the Guinness record, explains why an Israeli company is making a product that has no local market.

But Christian tourists flock to Israel and their appetite for religious ornamentation - ranging from kitsch to spiritual -- is anything but nano.